Lionel Trilling and the fate of cultural criticism.

Lionel Trilling and the Fate of Cultural Criticism.

by Mark Krupnick (NorthwesternUniversity, 215 pp., $21.95)

BY THE TIME of his death, in November1975, Lionel Trilling had become truly a celebrity. A long, laudatory obituary of him appeared in the New York Times; Time magazine ran a detailed account of his scholarly achievements; and Commentary devoted an entire essay to a discussion of his funeral service. Trilling figures prominently in Norman Podhoretz's Making It and Breaking Ranks. In both autobiographical works, Trilling stands out as a role model, although Podhoretz, as the historian Alexander Bloom observes, moved away from his teacher twice: once in becoming a radical in the early Sixties and a second time, "when he passed him on the right.' Another of Trilling's students in English literature at Columbia University, Jeffrey Hart, describes him with comparable reverence. Yet Hart, a Catholic and a conservative, believes that Trilling could not perceive the defects of the modernism he represented. While some interpret Trilling as a friend of conservatism--or at least neoconservatism --who could not go all the way, Sixties-type leftists, particularly Morris Dickstein in Gates of Eden, claim to find him on the radical side. Trilling, who emphasized subjectivity in his literary criticism, was drawing attention to the alienating structures of modern American life.

Trilling's reputation has somethingstriking about it that goes beyond the range of his admirers. Mark Krupnick, in this first published biography of him, characterizes Trilling as being "the single most important cultural critic in this century among American men of letters' without being the foremost reader of texts, aesthetic theorist, or "wide-ranging literary intelligence.' Krupnick manages to define "cultural criticism' in such a way as to fit Trilling's particular interests in selfhood, alienation, and the liberal imagination. This is not to suggest that Krupnick engages in empty puffery. Trilling was for many a compelling intellectual figure, although in the light of conventional scholarly standards it may be difficult to understand why. Much of his oeuvre was undistinguished: studies (now dated) of Matthew Arnold and E. M. Forster; an artistically flawed novel, The Middle of the Journey; and some mostly forgotten short stories. He also published several volumes of essays, one of which, The Liberal Imagination (1949), brought unexpected fame by selling more than 100,000 copies. Trilling's writing could always be distinguished by its convoluted and deliberately archaic style. An admirer of Matthew Arnold, Trilling reveled in Victorian syntax and nineteenth-century aesthetic judgments.

But his defects somehow enhancedhis aura of greatness. His was a constructed self, a testimony to the cultural modernism he expounded. The son of Polish Jewish immigrants, he willed himself to become a Columbia University professor of English, at a time when others of his background were excluded from that honor. And he turned himself into something even less likely, given his starting point, than a respected professor: a mid-nineteenth-century Victorian gentleman, stylistic tics and all. Krupnick grasps the unsettling aspect of this situation. He notes that the "tradition' evoked in Trilling's work was never a personal ancestral one. He remarks that Trilling used the terms "credence' and "assent,' borrowed from John Henry Newman, to describe his psychological --not theological--evolution. Trilling worked to develop a Victorian persona, independently of those religious doctrines that inhered, if only vestigially, in Victorian English culture. He thought first that Marxism, then that Freudian psychology explained problems that some (but not all) Victorians had turned to religion to understand. In his later years, Trilling increasingly abandoned the gods of modernity, but he clung to the virtue of civility, which he identified with Matthew Arnold.

Ironically, Trilling, the modernistwith the constructed self, came to hold thoroughly conservative attitudes incompatible with his professed modernist beliefs. Though The Liberal Imagination is sometimes used to illustrate Trilling's blindness to the American conservative heritage, the work is a brief against the impoverished and programmed liberal imagination. One can easily move from there to the implicit conclusion that only conservatives, or anti-liberals, produce and appreciate great art. Trilling's novel, The Middle of the Journey (1947), deals critically not only with Communist fellow-travelers but, as Krupnick points out, with liberal idealism in general. The two Communist sympathizers, Arthur and Nancy Croom, sentimentalize about the working class but are unable to confront the impending death of a friend, which threatens to shatter their dream world. The friend, John Laskell, who is the protagonist of the novel, draws inner strength from his suffering, while his intimations of mortality raise him above the claims of any political ideology.

Krupnick sees beyond the themes ofredemptive suffering and naive fellow-traveling to what is biographically most significant in Trilling's thinly disguised statement of belief: "the portrait of the self-deluded liberal . . . in opposition to whom his best criticism of the Forties was written.' If Krupnick is right, then Trilling by the late Forties had abandoned not only his earlier Communist infatuation but any passion for political reform. The protagonist of his novel, who is portrayed as spiritually superior to the politically idealistic Crooms, is unmistakably apolitical.

Trilling's most enduringachievement, as a teacher even more than as a writer, was to have shown the civilizing value of great literature. He recognized literary greatness without regard to sectarian concerns. Unlike other New York intellectuals, he hailed the flowering of Southern literature and Southern literary criticism from the 1930s on. Even before he had fully renounced the Left, he praised William Faulkner and Allen Tate for their tragic visions. He also mocked the simpleminded playwright Clifford Odets, long a favorite of New York radicals. According to Krupnick, Trilling created "a new kind of cultural hero' on the Left, a "self-divided man' contemptuous of "simplistic rally cries.' But such a model could not be appropriated by the Left, for the behavior Krupnick associates with Trilling avoided politics as well as rallying cries. The self-divided man moved from the middle of his journey toward the kind of ideal exemplified by John Laskell.

This picture of Trilling is hard tosquare with the more political one familiar to his neoconservative critics and admirers. Podhoretz in particular was disturbed that Trilling failed to act more decisively when student radicals vandalized Columbia University in 1968. Trilling was betraying his own political convictions by not speaking emphatically against the vandals. In November 1968, his wife, Diana, published an essay in Commentary in which she denounced the student radicals but depicted her husband as caught between loyalties to his political values and to his students.

I myself once reacted tothis defense with righteous disgust, but would do so no longer. The postwar Trilling took his refus d'engagement earnestly enough not to allow the New Left or its critics to interrupt his way of life. As an older, established teacher, he may have preferred winning the trust of promising students, even those who showed seriously defective judgment, to defending an academic establishment of careerists, bureaucrats, and ideologues. Trilling sounded like the Crooms when he sentimentalized about his students. But he was right in not going to battle for the purity of a self-defiled institution. Having arrived, he had lost his illusion about the object of his striving, together with his idealism. Not cowardice but a sense of proportion may have been what caused him to stay out of the storm in 1968.